Whose freedom is it anyway?

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In the summer of 1955, John McCarthy sat down to write a funding proposal. He wanted the Rockefeller Foundation to pay for a workshop at Dartmouth the following year, and the field he hoped the workshop would inaugurate did not yet have a name. The obvious candidates were compromised. He had already co-edited a volume called Automata Studies and has been disappointed by the papers the title attracted. Cybernetics was taken, and came attached to Norbert Wiener, with whom, McCarthy admitted years later, he preferred not to argue. So he coined something new: artificial intelligence .<br>A decade after the proposal, Joseph Weizenbaum built a program at MIT called ELIZA, a few hundred lines of code that imitated a psychotherapist by rearranging a person's statements into questions. It understood nothing, and Weizenbaum knew that, because he had written every line. His secretary had watched him write them. That didn't stop her from asking him at one point to leave the room so she could talk to ELIZA in private. Weizenbaum spent much of the rest of his career trying to explain why that moment alarmed him, most fully in Computer Power and Human Reason in 1976.<br>John McCarthy conceded, years later, that nobody involved could define intelligence in a way that cleanly separated what the machines did from what they didn't. The phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ was a bid, addressed to a funder, and it worked so well that seventy years on it organizes hundreds of billions of dollars, several national industrial strategies, and the daily speech of millions of people who have never heard of the Dartmouth workshop, or John McCarthy.<br>Courtesy of Stanford UniversityThe appropriating vocabulary of technology has a long history. It is useful, because it performs a specific job. It has a purpose. We still talk about horsepower when we want to measure how powerful cars are. A workhorse is a reliable machine performing demanding tasks. If your laptop has top-of-the-line specs it is probably a beast. The machine sees; more precisely, a statistical function maps pixels to labels, but "computer vision" was easier to fund. The machine learns; more precisely, it compresses the recorded work of millions of people into a set of weights, but learning sounds like education, and education is not something you owe the textbook's authors for. The machine hallucinates; more precisely, the product is defective, but a defective product owes you a refund, while a mind that hallucinates asks for your patience. You feed data to a system, the system ingests data. A resource-hungry system consumes resources and digests information. AI is data-hungry and starved for compute. Neural, memory, reasoning, understanding: each borrowed word moves the object a little further out of the category of things machinistic, and a little further into the category of beings. The opposite, of course, has formed as well. Every era has described the mind in the image of its proudest machinery: hydraulic humours, clockwork, automaton, engine of reason... Now it is we who process, who lack bandwidth, who are hardwired, who need to reboot.<br>None of this would matter much if words were ornaments. But they are not, because words often become verdicts a priori. They settle quietly, before any argument has been made about ownership, accountability and liability. Which is to say, in our topic of technology and language, every technology poses two questions: who gets to define it, and who gets to use it. The first question (who gets to define it) is settled in funding proposals and product names and press releases, and the people who settle it are the same people who own the machines. The rest of us then (usually the ‘who’ in the ‘who gets to use it’) conduct the argument about use inside specific and narrow definitions. Presiding over the whole vocabulary is its largest and most profitable word, the one the industry cannot get through a paragraph without; Freedom . The tools, we are told, will make us free.<br>Whether that specific promise of freedom means anything of substance depends on the actual meaning of freedom as a concept, and freedom turns out to be one of the most contested definitions in history. Its standard form comes from Isaiah Berlin in 1958. Negative freedom is the absence of interference: nobody stops you from doing a thing and so you carry on to do that thing. Positive freedom is the presence of capacity: you are actually able to lead the life you want, within reasonable constraints. Anglophone political culture, American culture above all, settled on the first (negative freedom) and let the second (positive freedom) fall into disuse. In that absence, freedom came to mean, almost by reflex, 'freedom from' .<br>The historian Timothy Snyder, gives an account of this from the war on Ukraine. Drive the occupier out of a village and its people are, in the negative sense, free; nobody now prevents anything. But if there is no...